So David Broder wrote a column yesterday warning all Americans against the terrifying possibility that we might shift to a system in which whoever got the most popular votes for President of the United States would, you know, become President of the United States. Regardless of whether those votes came from Idaho or Massachussetts. Broder's ire has been awakened by a proposed move to get state legislatures to render the electoral college irrelevant, by adopting laws to award their Electoral College votes to whoever wins the national popular vote. Broder has several objections, of which all but one are tired, bogus, elitist, and basically pro-sclerosis. The other one is just wrong.
His first objection is wilfully obtuse. In response to proponents of scrapping the electoral college who note that voters in all non-battleground states are essentially excluded from the campaign, he writes:
It seems to assume that voters in New York and Texas are somehow excluded from awareness of everything that happens in the campaign -- as if the newspapers and TV stations in their states were not covering it every day.
First of all, elections aren't supposed to be spectator sports; they're supposed to be participatory ones. As a New Yorker, I may have "awareness" of whether or not Joe Torre decided to pull his ace in the bottom of the 8th and send in Mariano Rivera, but I don't get to vote on the decision. I am, however, supposed to get a say in who becomes President; but because, again, I am a New Yorker, I basically have none. My state will always vote for the Democrat (unless it be George McGovern). If we scrapped the Electoral College, my vote would be worth as much as that of, say, somebody in Philadelphia.
Secondly, the point is that the campaign is directed towards people who live in battleground states. The fact that I can watch the candidates on TV promising more anti-Castro sops to Cuban-Americans in Florida or more farm subsidies to agrobusiness interests in Missouri serves mainly to confirm my knowledge that they don't care about my vote or my issues. "The campaign" isn't some static thing that just exists independent of the voters it's trying to appeal to - much as elite members of the Washington press corps might think it does.
Broder next name-checks Mighty Shibboleth.
Past efforts to abolish the electoral college have foundered on the objections of small states, which worry that they would be ignored in the pursuit of giant voting blocs in big population centers. Have their claims no merit?
No, they don't. Presidential candidates currently ignore almost all small states, because they aren't competitive. The only small states which received any attention in 2004 were New Mexico, Nevada, New Hampshire, Maine and West Virginia - because they were battleground states. Hawaii, Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont and Wyoming were utterly neglected, and Iowa, Arkansas, Oklahoma and other smallish states barely received a nod. The candidates spent between peanuts and nothing on advertising in these states, and they didn't campaign there, so it's hard to see how the EC kept them from being "ignored". In fact, the entire 2004 election was basically waged in Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio - all large states. Broder knows this perfectly well; the studies pointing this out have been public for years now, so for him to resurrect the old small-states shibboleth is just wilful obtuseness.
Broder's final objection appears reasonable, but is actually smoke and mirrors:
past proposals for direct election have snagged on the question of allowing a simple plurality to win or requiring a runoff if no candidate receives more than, say, 40 percent of the vote.
This issue raises no greater issue with the proposed change in the EC than it does with the current system. The proposed change would simply direct that each state award all its representatives to the winner of the national vote, rather than to the winner of its internal vote. If that winner had won only a plurality, rather than an absolute majority, he would still get all the state's votes - just as plurality-winner Bill Clinton did with each state's individual votes in 1992 and 1996. We needed no runoff then, and we would need no runoff under the proposal.
Broder worries that the proposed system might tempt more third-party candidates to enter, to try to "tip the balance" in the race. It is difficult to understand why this would happen. Third-party candidates draw support from those candidates closest to them ideologically, so the only possible effect of such candidacies would be to pose a greater threat of awarding the election to the candidate who is more distant from them ideologically. Such weirdly kamikaze candidacies may sometimes occur - and, indeed, they already do. In 5 of the 10 elections since 1968, a third-party candidate has had a significant effect on the outcome, usually paradoxical. Why would a truly national voter base make such candidacies more likely? If anything, they might make them LESS attractive. In 2000, for example, progressives in New York felt comfortable voting for Nader because they knew their states would go for Gore, and thus their votes would not end up electing Bush. With truly national elections, these voters would be unlikely to indulge in such protest voting.
Broder's final verdict is fascinating:
That is why a change of this scale requires careful consideration -- something the amendment process provides and this mechanism is designed to circumvent.
This opinion appears to have been captured by a giant radar array from its point of emanation on some distant political planet in another galaxy. The idea that any proposals in our modern American political system are the result of "careful consideration", rather than a fortuitously powerful alignment of interested forces backed by a groundswell created in the wake of a crisis, is laughable. In the late 1970s people at least pretended that politics worked this way. (Actually for a while in the early 1990s they did, too.) Today they have long stopped pretending. This moment, while the memories of Florida '00 and Ohio '04 are still fresh, is the moment to scrap the antiquated rusting hulk of the Electoral College. We do it now, or we'll be stuck with it for another century or until the country collapses into revolution and we rewrite the Constitution - which, the way things are going lately, will probably come first.
